I was happily using my laptop 2 days ago when I suddenly got bombarded, and I mean bombarded with popups. I had extra icons appear on the desktop (windows live guard or something) and I had to tackle them all.
I consider myself quite au fait with this kind of thing and computers in general, since I have fiddled with them for 7 years quite intensely, and helped many others with hijack/spyware problems, but this one is unbelievable.
The system is always maintained with AVG, Spybot, Adaware and hijack this. I ran all of those. I'm on SP2. Ever since then, I've searched for extra antivirus things, and tried the replacement of wsaupdater with something ini.exe... I did that twice to no avail.
I can tell you the moment it happened and all went wrong. I had updated AVG, it found about 77 viruses by 6,000 files checked (incredible for my system since usually it finds nothing!) and I stopped it because it hung up for 45 minutes on one number, and I thought thats wrong (I am patient but 45 minutes?) anyway - it removed the files it had found. Then, I closed that box, and it said it found a trojan (win32 variants - and I did have vurtumonde - tried using that virtu remover but to no avail also) I said remove it, and a quick BSOD, with very little text which is unusual, then it restarted, and that is when the looping started.
I am at a loss, and formatting is not an option. I bought the laptop genuinely, everything is genuine - nothing of a cracked nature. I do, however, have a disk although it didn't come with the computer. It's one my gdad got from Microsoft, so I could have the files if your solution involved Windows Recovery.
I anxiously await any help from this loop of insanity!
Regards,
Dan.
(It does work when I go into Safe Mode, though!)